Heinrich Himmler
...r non-existence of the white man; and we guide his destiny.” In March 1933, he was appointed Munich Police President and afterwards became Commander of the political police throughout Bavaria. In September he was made Commander of all political units outside Prussia and became head of the Prussian police and Gestapo on 20 April 1934. By June 17, 1936, Himmler won control of the political and criminal police throughout the Third Reich, becoming head of the Gestapo in addition to being the Reichsfurher of the SS. Himmler’s dream of a race of blue-eyed, blond heroes was to be achieved by creating an elite according to the “laws of Selection” based on mental and physical tests, character and spirit. He believed in breeding a racially organized order which would combine charismatic authority with bureaucratic discipline. The SS man would represent a new human type, warrior, administrator, scholar and leader all in one. His mission would be to take the East. From the beginning Himmler had introduced the principle of racial selection and special marriage laws which would ensure that people of “high value” would stay together. By establishing the human stud farm known as Lebensborn, young girls with perfect Nordic traits were to procreate with SS men and their offspring would better cared for than in maternity homes for married mothers. Himmler’s procreation order of 28 October 1939 to the entire SS that “it will be the sublime task of German women and girls of good blood acting not frivolously but from a profound moral seriousness to become mothers to children off soldiers setting of to battle”. The small humble looking man had a pale, round, expressionless face and a completely inoffensive air. He looked more like a bank clerk than Germany’s police dictator. He was described as “a man of quiet unemotional gestures, a man without nerves”. He suffered from severe headaches and intestinal spasms and almost fainted at the sight of a hundred Jews being executed for his benefit on the Russian front. After this he ordered a more humane way of “exterminating” Jews by the use of poison gas in specially constructed chambers disguised as shower rooms. By the end of the 1930’s, Himmler almost realized his goal of building a Greater Germanic Reich as he reached the peak of his power. In October 1939 Hitler appointed him Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom and he was given absolute control of a large slice of Poland. Responsible for bringing people of German descent back from outside the Reich into it’s borders, he set out to replace Poles and Jews by Germans from the Baltic lands and other parts of Poland. Within a year over a million Poles and 300,000 Jews had been driven away from their homes. It was Himmler’s talent of indoctrinating the SS with idealism beyond all guilt and responsibility, which rationalized mass murder as a form of martyrdom. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his speech on 4 October 1943 to the SS Group Leaders in Poznan: One principle must be absolute for the SS man: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Chechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me. Such god blood of our own kind as there may be among the nations we shall acquire for ourselves, if necessary by taking away the children and bringing them among us. Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany. We shall never be rough or heartless where it is not necessary; that is clear. We Germans who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals. I shall speak to you here with all frankness of a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite fr...